OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
House Speaker and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi has more at stake in the 2022 midterms than she thought.
House Minority Leader, and the man presumed to be the next Speaker if Republicans win in November, California Rep. Kevin McCarthy said that there will be an investigation into the Pelosis if the GOP is victorious in the midterms.
His concern is the fact that Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, has had a tremendous success in picking the correct stocks to purchase and sell and recently purchased large shares of NVIDIA prior to the House and Senate passing legislation that benefited the company.
“I would look all the way through it,” he said of the Democrat proposal to ban stock trading for spouses of Congress members. “What I’ve told everybody is we will come back, and we will not only investigate this, we will come back with a proposal to change the current behavior.”
And the legislation is not going to be debated or voted on until Congress comes back from its August recess.
“Her husband can trade all the way through, but now it becomes a crisis?” he said. “I think what her husband did was wrong.”
“I think we need to bring trust back to this institution,” he said. “I think we have to do a thorough investigation and look at what is the proper role for members of Congress and what influence they have, and I don’t think the proper way to do this is Nancy Pelosi writing the bill because we have proven that she can’t do that.”
Democrats plan to introduce legislation next month that would prevent stock trades by members of Congress and their spouses, Punchbowl News reported.
“Punchbowl News: House Democrats plan to announce a proposal next month to ban lawmakers, their spouses, and senior staff from trading stocks, according to multiple sources close to the issue,” Kyle Griffin said on Twitter.
Punchbowl News: House Democrats plan to announce a proposal next month to ban lawmakers, their spouses and senior staff from trading stocks, according to multiple sources close to the issue.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 28, 2022
The Daily Mail reported:
The framework would force members of Congress, their spouses, and senior staff to place assets in either a qualified blind trust or completely sell them off. Lawmakers, spouses, and staff would still be able to hold mutual funds.
Leadership’s goal is to get the legislation through the House in September, according to Punchbowl News.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who as head of the House Administration Committee has been tasked with reviewing the different proposals, told DailyMail.com on Friday the framework would be out ‘in the coming weeks.’
Last week congressional stock purchases were again under fire after Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul purchased over $1 million in shares of semiconductor firm Nvidia as Congress was negotiating the bill to inject billions into the semiconductor chip industry. The Senate passed that bill Wednesday and the House is expected to pass it on Thursday.
“This issue of whether and how Members of Congress engage in various financial transactions deserves scrutiny by the Committee,’ Sen. Josh Hawley said in a letter to Sen. Gary Peters, chair of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
“In 2020 Speaker Pelosi and her husband outperformed the S&P 500 by a whopping 14.3 percent,” he said. A report showed that 90 percent of investment funds that are actively managed do not do that.
Speaker Pelosi was not in favor of any type of ban but in February she changed her opinion if it involved the entire government.
“It has to be government-wide,” she said. “The judiciary has no reporting. The Supreme Court has no disclosure. It has no reporting of stock transactions, and it makes important decisions every day.”
“We’re a free market economy,” she said in December. “[Lawmakers] should be able to participate in that.”
Last week, during her weekly press briefing, she was asked about her husband’s stock trading and she was not thrilled about it.
“Has your husband ever made a stock purchase or sale based on info received from you?” the reporter said to a flustered Speaker.
“No! Absolutely not, okay, thank you,” she said as she hurried off the stage.
